Grand Jurors Just Props In Starr's Big Production

September 13, 1998|By Denis Horgan; Courant Columnist

While they're throwing around the bouquets and apologies, maybe someone should remember the poor grand jurors who sat for so long in Washington enduring the gruesome business of the President's abysmal behavior.

For nothing.

Clearly there was never any idea to produce a criminal indictment from that grand jury -- the Congress being the preferred road, constitutionally and politically. So these worthies had to give up their work, disrupt their lives and get needlessly stirred up being stage props in someone else's play. Bumps on the log, Potemkin people, they were part of the game like the rest of us.

At least they had good seats.

It is a game, as can be seen in the Kenneth ``Missionary Position'' Starr report, that demonstrates beyond doubt that Clinton is a dope. He is a dope for acting the way he did and he is a double-dope for lying to us about it. And there is some further dope status for possibly stepping into the snares that Starr set for him in his perjury sting. The president is at legal peril not because of his reckless and adolescent libido but because he took the bait set out afterward by the prosecutor who had nothing else to go with.

Eventually we will wear out the guffaws and lowbrow jokes rising from Starr's discovery that the answer is ``Yes'' to the $40 million question, ``Is there sex in sex?'' What will we have then? Maybe we will have the reckoning that they got him for an offense they created for him to willingly commit -- because they couldn't get him on anything else after all these years.

Starr unloads an avalanche of material and droolly observations to support the truth that people often do sexual things inelegantly by someone else's observation. Tsk-tsking that the matter is not about sex, Monica Lewinsky's every recollection of her sexual behavior with the president is offered up in the overdone volume that so much marks the way this thing has gone. Unlike as in good drama and fireworks displays, Clinton's enemies seem to eschew understatement and pacing-toward-a- climax, favoring instead the full shriek for as long as the vocal cords will hold out.

Let's stipulate, as the lawyers say, that Bill Clinton is a foolish person, an insult to his family and friends and a most flawed individual indeed. His behavior and that of Lewinsky invite calamity, and it arrives on schedule in the Starr Express.

That produces Starr's sole advantage as it is the only thing he has after all this time, effort and money. There are no plum jobs at Pepperdine for coming up with a tepid conclusion that Bill Clinton is a cad. Particularly so when every other trail suffixed with ``-gate'' led nowhere.

In a campaign without boundaries a prosecutor without limits will hunt down something on even a person less vulnerable than the randy Clinton. Setting up the opportunity to lie about it afterward, the national sex police snapped the trap.

Imagining himself the new Archibold Cox instead of, say, the new J. Edgar Hoover or the new Joe McCarthy, Starr lectures the dim-bulb Congress that there are impeachable offenses to consider, obstruction of justice in what some might otherwise see as obstruction of politics.

It is a neat diversion from the fact that the Starr chambers in Washington and elsewhere produced not even the legendary thin gruel for all their efforts on other complaints against the president going back for decades. Deflecting with excruciating detail on sex, they don't wany anyone asking what happened to all the money, all the time, all the resources dedicated to Travelgate? Fostergate? Filegate? Troopergate? Whitewatergate? Gategate?

With ancient ploys -- which were successful, if not assuredly right -- the state decided that the individual was guilty and set out to catch him at something. Anything. Starr did not invent Monica Lewinsky but he converted her into an agent of impeachment, fulfilling his goal. In his idiotic human behavior, Clinton opened the door through which the prosecutor barged.

They wormed the hook and Clinton obliged them by taking it. Irrespective of whether the offense is worth the dime, they shift the focus to what Clinton did afterward, how he denied it, how he defended himself. It is a legal ``gotcha'' not much admired when applied even to pickpockets and sneak-thieves.

Let's hope the grand jurors got lunch money out of all this. It may be the only good thing they -- or the rest of us -- ever see from this dismal business.